If you record your life in iCal, Apple's free desktop calendar program for Mac OS X, you're in luck. Perhaps not surprisingly, the iPod has an excellent rapport with its i-named sibling.
Getting your iCal calendar onto the iPod is simple: you just use Apple's free iSync program, exactly as described in Chapter 11. It automatically synchronizes and updates complete iCal calendars between the Macintosh and the iPod. (In iCal lingo, a calendar is one category, or set, of appointments. You might have three, called Home, Work, and Rotary Club—or Dad, Mom, and Deb. iCal color-codes your appointments to show what calendar they belong to, as shown in Figure 9-1.)